Worm’s
Worm
A program that makes copies of itself; for example, from one disk drive to
another, or by copying itself using
email or another transport mechanism. The worm may do
damage and compromise the security of the computer.
It may arrive in the form of
a joke program or software of some sort.
Similar to a virus, a worm is a self-replicating
program that does not necessarily alter files, but resides
in active memory and duplicates itself.
Worms use parts of the operating system that are usually invisible
to the user. It is not uncommon for worms to
go unnoticed until their replication eats up system resources,
slowing or stopping other tasks.
The recent MSBlaster
worm presented users with a myriad of problems including:
o
Error
message that svchost.exe (or other software) has generated errors and must be
restarted.
o
Not
being able to copy and paste in various applications
o
System
instability
o
Unusually
high network traffic
o
Virus
software that will not function properly
o
Inability
to install new software
Additionally, the worm had the
ability to launch an attack against windowsupdate.com. If all of the infected
computers had tried to repeatedly connect to the site as planned, a denial-of-service
would have resulted from all of the traffic (too many computers connecting all
at once, resulting in the site becoming inaccessable).
Microsoft's update site is NOT at that address, but they had an automatic
redirection to the correct page from there. Fortunately, Microsoft found out
about the potential attack and took down the windowsupdate.com redirection
before the attack was to have started.
If people had been keeping up
with their Windows Updates, the Blaster worm would have been a lot
less damaging. The security hole that the Blaster worm exploited had a patch
available almost 2 months before the worm hit the Internet! (don’t
feel bad even Microsoft
with all their warnings forgot to update some of there system’s and yep you guessed it .. they
got the blaster worm!)